On her book Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form
Cover Interview of August 18, 2020
Lastly
My broadest hope for this book is that readers living in
different areas of the world will immediately recognize the aesthetically impoverished,
yet oddly compelling and often funny capitalist form I am describing, even if the
word “gimmick” doesn’t circulate in the language they speak.
Theory of the Gimmick is also a theory of aesthetic
judgment: an ordinary but intersubjectively complex and often rhetorically creative
speech act. My hope is that the book brings out this oddly underexamined “side”
of aesthetic experience, which is the side that involves a verbal performance.
The gimmick is a fundamentally suspicious judgment, in
which we categorically distinguish the false from the true by expressing doubt
about “value” being where capitalist society purports it to be. Yet this public
exercising of suspicion is often bound up with playfulness and humor, and the pleasures
of sharing our aesthetic experiences with others in general.
Theory of the Gimmick thus tries to remind literary
scholars, in particular, of how much critical processing of capitalism goes on
in ordinary conversation—and in everyday aesthetic experiences. For, over the
last decade in this discipline there has been an unrelenting effort to convince
people that “aesthetic experience” and “critique” are somehow opposed, and that
“critique” is a humorless and fundamentally elitist activity.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
Lastly
My broadest hope for this book is that readers living in different areas of the world will immediately recognize the aesthetically impoverished, yet oddly compelling and often funny capitalist form I am describing, even if the word “gimmick” doesn’t circulate in the language they speak.
Theory of the Gimmick is also a theory of aesthetic judgment: an ordinary but intersubjectively complex and often rhetorically creative speech act. My hope is that the book brings out this oddly underexamined “side” of aesthetic experience, which is the side that involves a verbal performance.
The gimmick is a fundamentally suspicious judgment, in which we categorically distinguish the false from the true by expressing doubt about “value” being where capitalist society purports it to be. Yet this public exercising of suspicion is often bound up with playfulness and humor, and the pleasures of sharing our aesthetic experiences with others in general.
Theory of the Gimmick thus tries to remind literary scholars, in particular, of how much critical processing of capitalism goes on in ordinary conversation—and in everyday aesthetic experiences. For, over the last decade in this discipline there has been an unrelenting effort to convince people that “aesthetic experience” and “critique” are somehow opposed, and that “critique” is a humorless and fundamentally elitist activity.